IT’S a little known detail of the so-called ‘blackbirding’ trade: how a group of Aboriginal Australians ended up in Vanuatu, never to return home.

Chief Richard David Fandanumata has travelled to Australia from Vanuatu to see the land his great-grandfather came from.

He hopes to find his lost relatives with just a handful of clues.

“I want to find out where Manuma from, that name,” he said. “If any Aboriginal people know ‘Manuma’ or ‘Makuma’, that is the place where my great-grandfather was taken.”

Chief Richard’s great-grandfather was an Aboriginal Australian who ended up on the island of Tongariki around 1910.

His story starts with the so-called ‘blackbirding’ trade of the mid to late 1800s.

Thousands of workers were tricked, kidnapped, or occasionally came willingly, from the Pacific Islands to work in Australia’s sugar cane fields.

Chief Richard’s forebears from Tongariki were among them. He says the men were chained and sometimes beaten. They worked for some time at a sugar factory in Caboolture, but may have moved between towns for work.

Emelda Davis, chairwoman of the Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson, said Pacific Islanders often lived closely alongside Aboriginal people.

“Given the nature of that trade, you had Indigenous, Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islanders all working alongside each other under slavery conditions,” she says.

This close interaction sometimes led to marriages – and violence.

In 2012, Chief Richard and his brother Abel David, a former Vanuatu Member of Parliament, were part of a group of South Sea Islanders who travelled to Bundaberg for a ‘sorry’ ceremony, apologising for the past killing of Aboriginal people.

Ms Davis says the workers were acting under instruction from their bosses.

“This was something, their hands were forced, in order to do this, tribal warfare, in order to clear the land, but same time, our people took on board the young children that were abandoned,” she says.

An estimated 7000 Melanesian workers were deported after 1901 when the White Australia policy kicked in.

“We’ve always been aware of the Australian Aboriginal descendants living in Vanuatu,” says Ms Davis.

Details of exactly how they ended up there and what happened next are unclear. But tales have been kept alive by oral histories passed on through families.

Generations of Chief Richard’s family have told how his great-grandfather, a man named ‘Manuma’ or ‘Makuma’, depending on the dialect, was rescued at sea and taken to Tongariki with returning workers.

He narrowly avoided a grim fate.

“They should have ate him, because we [were] still cannibals at that time, but chief says we’ll take care of him, and chief gave him his daughter to marry,” he said.

His family story tells of two children who were smuggled into the hold of a ship called the Lady Norman.

“They bring with them two children, namely Willie Tutukan and Rossi. We are born out of these two little children. Willie Tutukan married to a Tongariki woman.”

Pastor Willie says there are now about 400 known descendants of Willie Tutukan and Rossi, living in Tongariki and elsewhere.

He says Aboriginal descendants today face discrimination in Vanuatu.

“It’s very hard, we are always under discrimination,” he says.

“They look down on us and… sometimes call us ‘trouble people’. We have been hurt.”

Last week the men, along with several other descendants, travelled to Australia to make the first steps towards finding their long lost family members.

Tukini Tavui of the Pacific Islands Council of South Australia helped facilitate the trip after hearing of their plight through Dr David Bunton, whose own forebears were missionaries to Vanuatu in the 1800s.

“I think it’s important that Australians are aware, particularly Aboriginal people, that they have families over there that were taken during those times, in the early 1900s,” he says.

Chief Richard David says he knows finding his family will be a difficult task, but even being in Australia has been healing.

“It’s been hard today, but there will be tears of joy since we are coming back home.”

]]>http://melanesia.net/indigenous-descendants-from-vanuatu-begin-family-search.html/feed/0Melanesian people: The world’s only natural black blondeshttp://melanesia.net/melanesian-people-the-worlds-only-natural-black-blondes.html/
http://melanesia.net/melanesian-people-the-worlds-only-natural-black-blondes.html/#respondThu, 27 Dec 2018 05:29:31 +0000http://melanesia.net/?p=252For several years, blond hair was attributed to Caucasians but the Melanesians of Solomon Islands are one of the few groups with blonde hair outside Europe.

Melanesians are black island people in the south pacific that migrated over thousands of years ago, long before the blacks that came to the Americas as slaves.

Melanesia is a sub-region of Oceania extending from the western end of the Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, and eastward to Fiji. The region comprises most of the islands immediately north and northeast of Australia, including the countries of Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Island, and New Caledonia. The name Melanesia was first used by Jules Dumont d'Urville in 1832 to denote an ethnic and geographical grouping of islands distinct from Polynesia and Micronesia.

Melanesian people of Solomon Islands

Until recently, the indigenous melanesian people practised cannibalism, head-hunting, kidnapping and slavery, just like the Asmat tribe, but with contact with Europeans, the population is now predominantly Christian. However, more than 90% lead rural lives.

Melanesian Blonde hair

Melanesian people of Solomon Islands

The Melanesian people of the Solomon Islands are the point of interest when it comes to dark skin and blond hair. The Solomon Islands are located in the South Pacific, the very heart of Melanesia, just Northeast of Australia, between Papua and Vanuatu and is an independent state within the British Commonwealth.

Although the indigenous Melanesian population of the islands possess the darkest skin outside of Africa, between 5 and 10% have bright blond hair.

Melanesian people of Solomon Islands

There have been several theories on how they got their blond hair — from sun and salt whitening, high fish intake, or genetic heritage from mixed-breeding with Americans/Europeans who founded the islands.

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A geneticist from Nova Scotia agricultural college in Canada, Sean Myles, conduced a genetic analysis on saliva and hair samples from 1209 Melanesian Solomon Island residents. From comparing 43 blond Islanders and 42 brown Islanders, he found that the blondes carried two copies of a mutant gene which is present in 26% of the island's population. The Melanesian people have a native TYRP1 gene which is partly responsible for the blond hair and melanin, and is totally distinct to that of Caucasians as it doesn't exist in their genes.

Melanesian people of Solomon Islands

It is a recessive gene and is more common in children than in adults, with hair tending to darken as the individual matures.

This contributes to the theories that black Africans were the first homo sapiens and that all races came out of the black African race.

Melanesian people of Solomon Islands

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]]>http://melanesia.net/melanesian-people-the-worlds-only-natural-black-blondes.html/feed/0Melanesianshttp://melanesia.net/melanesians.html
Tue, 22 May 2018 02:20:10 +0000http://melanesia.net/?page_id=132Melanesians are the dominant inhabitants of Melanesia. Most speak one of the many Papuan languages, though a few groups such as Moluccans, the Motu and Fijianspredominantly speak Austronesian languages. Melanesians occupy islands from Eastern Indonesia to as far east as the islands of Vanuatu and Fiji.[3]